In due time all was ready, and the hour arrived. All my terrors returned. I felt tempted to bolt from the house and leave my guests to entertain themselves. I hated Beadle Square. And there, of course, just when I should have liked things to be at their best, there were three or four cats setting up a most hideous concert in the yard, and the chimney in the parlour beginning to smoke. I could have torn my hair with rage and vexation.
I seized the tongs, and was kneeling down and vigorously pushing them up the chimney, to ascertain the cause of this last misfortune, when a loud double-knock at the door startled me nearly out of my senses. I had never realised what I was in for till now!
Horror of horrors! Who was to open the door, Mrs Nash, or I? We had never settled that. And while I stood trembling amid my smoke and eel-pie and half-boiled eggs, the knock was repeated—this time so long and loud that it must have been heard all over the square. I could hear voices and laughter outside. Some one asked, “Is this the shop?” and another voice said, “Don’t see his name on the door.”
Then, terrified lest they should perpetrate another solo on the knocker, I rushed out and opened the door myself, just as Mrs Nash, with her face scarlet and her sleeves tucked up above the elbows, also appeared in the passage.
They were all there; they had come down in a body. Oh, how shabby I felt as I saw them there with their fine clothes and free-and-easy manners!
“Hullo! here you are!” said Doubleday. “Found you out, then, at last. Haven’t been this way for an age, but knew it at once by the cats. Hullo, is this your mother? How do, Mrs Batchelor. Glad to see you. Allow me to introduce—”
“It’s not my mother!” I cried, with a suppressed groan, pulling his arm.
“Eh, not your mother?—your aunt, perhaps? How do you—”
“No, no,” I whispered; “no relation.”
“Not? That’s a pity! She’s a tidy-looking old body, too. I say, where do you stick your hats, eh? I bag the door-handle; you hang yours on the key, Crow. Come on in, you fellows. Here’s a spree!”